I wasn’t happy at Prabhakaran’s death, I saw myself in his (orphan) children: Rahul Gandhi

The Hush Post: Congress President Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday spoke about how he felt when LTTE chief Prabhakaran was killed. Prabhakaran is the man, who had planned the execution of Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination.

Prabhakaran’s body was strewn into pieces in the field in Sri Lanka.

“I called up my sister Priyanka and said that this is very strange, but I am not happy. I should be celebrating that the person who is dead is the person who killed my father. But somehow I am not happy. She said “you are right, I am not happy either’,” the Congress chief said. “The reason I wasn’t happy was that I saw myself in his children. So, I realised, him lying there actually means that there are kids like me who are crying,” he added.

The Congress chief said he has lost his family to violence. “My grandmother and my father were both assassinated. So, I have suffered violence,” Gandhi said at the Bucerius Summer School in Hamburg.

“I am talking actually from experience. The only way you can move forward after violence is forgiveness. There is no other way. And to forgive you have to understand what exactly happened and why it happened,” Rahul Gandhi said.

Former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was killed by her security guards in 1984, and her son and former PM Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated by a suicide bomber of the LTTE in 1991 at Sriperumbudur. Sri Lankan security forces shot dead Prabhakaran and destroyed the LTTE in May 2009, ending a quarter century of separatist war in the island nation.

“To deal with it is to actually listen and act non-violently. People think this is weakness. But in fact, this is strength. My father was killed by a terrorist in 1991. In 2009, I saw the person who killed my father lying in a field in Sri Lanka,” Rahul Gandhi said.

“He might have been a bad or an evil person, but the violence that was done against him was impacting others, like it had impacted me. If you go deep, you will find there is something that triggered that violence. It’s not just a random event. Some action or violence done against him or her has triggered it,” Rahul Gandhi said.

The Hush Post|12:37 pm|one-minute-read|
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